Random thoughts…Free will?…Whose idea was this?

Posted by: Lanny Donoho on May 18, 2010 at 12:23 am

Who's thoughts are these

I cannot claim to have a quarks worth of knowledge on the brain and neurophysiology as compared to the majority of people who write about it. The amount of knowledge there is about thinking and what it actually is…well the amount we know is astounding but absolutely nothing compared to what we don’t know. Heck we don’t even know what the word “know” means. So before my head explodes, let me see if I can get some thoughts out. And by the way, if you are predisposed to judging people on what they think they think about thinking and whether we are agents of free will or not…just hold off on the disparaging remarks if you don’t mind. The thoughts here are simply ideas that are out there…not necessarily my intrinsic beliefs. Wow, I just used two words I didn’t even know I knew.
Ok…here goes. Free will is the idea that we are in control of our own actions and our own thoughts. We are in control. We aren’t just watching a movie of our own life but can decide whatever we want.
However, There are certain interesting things going on in the science world as well as the philosophical world that might lead some folks to believe that we have no control over what and how we think. That scares some people a lot. They don’t even like to think about it. If you are one of those, then, you probably ought to go watch my Orangatar video and forget about reading this stuff. However you might want to know that there are potentially future neuromodulation techniques that will enhance the perception we need to feel like we are indeed in control of our own lives whether we actually are or not. So, don’t worry, we can eventually make you think you know what you think whether you really think it or not.
What the heck am I talking about here. Let me give you some examples. Normally people who are right handed seem to choose to use their right hand about 60% of the time. However when the right hemisphere of their brain is stimulated with a TMS device, they choose to move their left hand 80% of the time. But even in doing this they believe they are choosing to make that conscious decision and that nothing is influencing them otherwise. This simply means that conscious decisions can be controlled or changed without us ever realizing we have made different choices and it’s all because of electric stimulation or chemical reaction.

Lets go a bit deeper. Right now you know what you believe about certain things and think that you chose to believe those ideas about life on your own. But as many people have postulated, had you been born in a different part of the world, your major belief system could be totally different. You could have the same parents and siblings but if you grew up in China instead of the US, you would have had totally different influence from your time of birth, and a whole lot of decisions you make would be totally different. Not only that, but you might have a different favorite color, you would not like some of the food you like now and would like some food you detest now. The music you love would be totally different and …hang on…you may even have different parts of your brain being used for your thought processes. Recent studies have shown that there is this thing called neuroculturalism. Eastern humans have different parts of their brain light up on an MRI even when thinking about one’s mother. Asians might see a chaotic image of a city and the part of the brain that is used in developing relationships lights up. When an American sees the same image, the part of the brain that deals with objects lights up. Reasoning for this points to the fact that family and relationships is interwoven into more of the fabric of life than is done here in America.
Let’s go somewhere else. The genes of our ancestors have some interesting stuff in them. Some of that stuff makes the family tree an interesting set of branches and roots. You may be predisposed genetically to have a certain body type, which may make you feel a certain way about your self, which could also be influenced by where you grow up and that geography could actually control your moods and what you decide to eat and when you decide to eat it and how you treat the people around you. Those genes could make you impulsive or complacent, or bad-tempered or altruistic. Wow…does this mean you are gonna be the way you are and there is nothing you can do about it so you might as well go ahead and do whatever you want…or wait…is what you want really what you want or did your culture and your gene pool and the sugar you had this morning make you want what you want.
Do you do everything you do because you want to….and …this is weird but…is your “want” something inside your neuro anatomy that is actually different than what your brain tells you your want is?
Here is a quote that was given to some people just before they were engaged in a scientific experiment.
You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons

I think i think.

Interesting study.. What’s interesting about the experiment is that those who read this right before the test actually cheated on the test much more than those who did not read it.
The conclusion was that people who read this and believed it, actually did decide that they weren’t in control and it didn’t matter what they did…and then the question became, were they predisposed to act that way based on reading something like this or did they even know that this sentence affected them in any way? Whoosh! They didn’t decide to cheat. They just did. But the study shows that they most likely would not have cheated, if they hadn’t read that.

Here something else to think about if that hasn’t already made your head hurt. The frontal lobe areas of the brain, especially the Orbito-frontal cortex is involved in self- control and behavioral inhibition. Basically it helps you not to yell at people at parties and jump up and down and holler if you meet a girl you like a lot. People who have damage to those areas of the brain no longer have control of some of their actions. They become much more uninhibited. So, does that mean that our choices to act certain ways are affected by food, chemicals, bruises, etc.? Well of course we all know the answer is yes but does that mean that our personalities are a physical thing and not a mental choice thing? That we only act the way we act because of stuff we can’t control at all?

Now to go one layer deeper. We like to feel good. We don’t like pain or feeling bad.
We sometimes don’t even know that we are doing something specifically so that we will feel good. (yet some say that is why we do EVERYTHING we do…to satisfy ourselves…consciously or subconsciously) By the way feeling good, emotionally, or psychologically, is usually simply a matter of little particles or chemicals inside our brains reacting a certain way because of where they go and what they attach to and how they reproduce by chemical reactions. So, back to the question. When we give gifts to people because we think we are being nice and altruistic, could it simply be we are doing that so that we get an extra shot of dopamine or because our oxytocin or serotonin levels go up?
Even when we “sacrifice” to make someone else have a good day, is it because we like the way we feel when we sacrifice cuz we feel good about ourselves? If that is true then the question pops up again. Are we really in control and making decisions or are we simply doing actions that result in our own chemical reaction needs?
Think about this. Even a dog has emotional forces directing its behavior. My dog learned from its culture, which includes me, that sitting or staying when I command it, results in getting a treat. He does it because there is an emotional payoff for doing so. And, interestingly enough, when the dog obeys and I give him a treat, then I FEEL the satisfaction of being a good dog owner and provider, and part of that is because my culture values kindness to pets and cool dogs who do cool things and it FEELS good to behave consistently with my culture’s values. There are cultures where none of this could happen because the values of all of the above aren’t values there. So my culture has totally controlled all of what I “think” and feel about what you just read. Does that mean I had no choice in any of that?
Here is one more thing to consider that will frustrate you even more. And remember….I’m just giving you thoughts to think about so don’t get mad at me if this stuff messes with your belief system. I am not making any statements about what I believe, (yet) just throwing out information that you can think about.
Ok last thought on this blog…
Some or perhaps most single celled organisms have no discernible “brain” area, yet calculate, learn, and choose…such learning as a group being necessary for acquiring resistance to antibiotics as one example.

Ok this got weird so I will leave you with a quote from William James here for an ending.
“My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

Next blog…do you think what you think you think? Which is kind of like this one only different.

Random Thoughts on Thinking: part deaux.

Posted by: Lanny Donoho on May 16, 2010 at 12:22 am

 da brain
There is so much to talk about or think about when you think about thinking, it’s hard to know how to put it all into any kind of blog. Since I titled it Random thoughts about thinking, then I suppose I will just take one small concept at a time and throw it out there for you to contemplate. This one is simply about how one thought can make it’s way across time and space and people and connect to thousands of others. So here goes.

Ok, lets keep talking for a few minutes about how one thought can lead to another and then to another and what those connections could look like.
This is just a warm up exercise to get you to think. Let’s make up a story. Let’s just say Jeff Foxworthy is in his study thinking. He’s thinking because he has a gig and he has to come up with some new material. So he thinks about what makes things funny. He knows that when someone’s brain gets surprised, they laugh. He’s thinking about how people think. So he comes up with a joke that is funny and it’s funny because of how it messes with peoples’ minds. Surprise twists often make people laugh. They expect one thing and a totally opposite thing happens. You may hear an idea about someone peeing off a balcony but then when you hear and picture in your mind that it’s his aunt…not some guy…your brain does a double take and laugher erupts. His audience might expect him to say something red-neck-ish about his relatives and they will laugh at that… but then they laugh even harder when he talks about his aunt peeing off a balcony in Hawaii.
Ok, now picture this. Jeff later tells that joke in an arena in a different city where there is a 14 year old boy listening. The boy has laughed all night at Jeff, and at that joke, he laughs so hard he cries.

Think about this. Jeff thought about what makes people laugh. That made him think about a make believe story about his aunt. That thought gets put on paper and memorized by Jeff who tells it a year later in another town. A kid in middle school hears it, and ….in his mind, he actually sees this happening. His thoughts turn that story into reality in a way. When he sees it(in his minds eye) instantaneously after hearing Jeff say it, he has all kinds of things happening inside him.
The brain translates sounds into words and then into pictures and sends those pictures into another areas of the brain. New neural nets are created instantly. He’s been laughing and now he’s even crying which is kinda weird because normally we associate tears with sadness but as you know sometimes we laugh so hard we cry. By the time the comedy concert is over this middle school boy is thinking to himself how much fun that was.
Laughing is very much like a drug that sends chemicals into receptors that just “feel good” . So now this kid has thoughts similar to thoughts he has had many times, about wanting to be a comedian and make people laugh like that.

He doesn’t know it but part of the reason he wants to do it is because he loves laughing.(and he loves laughing because it sends more dopamine and other neurotransmitters that make you feel great zipping through the synapses of his mind). So that night he decides he is going to be a comedian. So he starts learning about timing and comedy and communication, and even joins the improv troup at his high school. He majors in communications at college and gets involved in theatre and comedy at a school, which by the way, he decided to go to because of their drama and arts program. He grows up and heads out to Hollywood where he goes to Caroline’s comedy club on their Monday night amateur night and he does great. His life takes him down the path where he becomes a major headliner at concert halls all over the country. He sits down one night in the year 2024 before a major show… and thinks. He thinks about comedy and what makes things funny and he writes a few great new jokes. He performs that next night and does so well that some aspiring young middle schooler in the audience laughs til he cries.

The story is made up but the fact is…people are having thoughts every day that are affecting the destiny of thousands of people every day and we don’t even know it.
Same kind of thing has happened with thousand of thoughts of all kinds of people connected to millions of others. Think about this. Einstein had a thought once. Energy is equal mass times the speed of light squared. This thought has changed everything in the world from the way people think and relate to how all of our futures look.
Ok…
That’s All for now …but the next episode is “Do we have free will? Are our thoughts really what we decide for them to be…or can we decide at all anything that we think?
And by the way…Jeff, if you read this, thanks for letting me make up a story about you. And… by the way, thanks for being such a great influence in so many ways to so many people. Even a made up kid in Cleveland.

Random thoughts on thinking…episode 1.

Posted by: Lanny Donoho on May 12, 2010 at 11:44 pm

Inside the MindAs you may know if you have been following, I’ve been studying thinking. How do we think? What is thinking? How can our thinking transform us, and our world.
It’s a fascinating study. I am realizing how little I know about what I know. Actually it kinda makes you wonder if you actually “know” anything. You think a lot of stuff, but do you know red is red. It is to you, but you can’t know that what you think is red is the same thing that others see as red. Someone asked me a question today, “do we even control our own thoughts”. Great question. Did you ever have those times (of course you did) when thoughts pop into your head and you didn’t mean to think those thoughts? You have no idea why that thought happened but it was just there.
I’ve been jogging down the road actually praying in my head, totally focused on someone else’s problem and praying for them to be better when in the middle of that prayer…or thought…or whatever is was…my brain went “dang I’d like to have a volkswagon convertible”.
Now, I didn’t see a car. I was totally into my friend’s problems and …Bam…I want a black VW convertible!??! And frankly if I were choosing a car, that wouldn’t be my first choice if I were choosing a car. Yet something in my head went to something that i thought i wanted even though i didn’t want it and didn’t intend to think it. So, yeah, we have a lot of thoughts that we aren’t necessarily trying to think but…it is us…or I should say it was “me” that had that thought and even though I wasn’t planning on thinking it…it was part of me and what makes up all that I am.

I’ve got a feeling that my brain was playing the word association game and something that I saw or thought or planned on thinking did the whole association thing and took me to the VW thought. So, did I “think” that, or did that thought just chemically show up in my head.? Cuz after all, thoughts are electrical impulses that are generated by chemical reactions. Did some chemical thing happen without my controlling it? We are our thoughts. Some of them we control. And interestingly, some of them control us. We have the ability at times to take control of our thoughts. And sometimes we can’t. Right now you can’t not think about a POLKA DOTTED ELEPHANT. You read it. And it showed up in your head. And now you think you can’t not think about it, and as long as you are reading about it , it’s gonna be “in there”. So, I just controlled your thoughts. And I did it at my “now”. Or I should say that what I did in my past when I wrote this was control the future thoughts you had when you read it in your present. But hey, that discussion is about time, which is a whole other topic that frankly is tied so closely to thoughts that we can’t separate them…but for now, I will stick with thinking. Maybe tease you a bit with how they are connected in a few paragraphs.

Here are some questions. Are you thinking about walking when you are walking? You did when you were first learning to walk. You had to concentrate hard on the whole balance thing and where to put your feet and what to do with your butt and you hands when you fell backwards. But now, you have done it a bunch and you think you don’t think about it. But your brain is controlling it and …isn’t that thinking? You focus more when you are walking on a floor covered with broken glass or something that is dangerous…like
when you are carrying glass, or a knife or a glass knife, while you are walking over glass. Part of your focus means that your eyes absorb everything that the light allows to illuminate in your field of vision. And so you see.
And what you see is processed and without thinking about thinking, your brain knows what it sees….the lamp, the picture on the wall, the girl on the steps and the glass that you just stepped on because you were looking at the girl on the steps. But now that you stepped on the glass, you quit thinking about the girl… or the steps, or the lamp… and seemingly all of your attention is now on the pain in your foot. You think you are thinking only about that.
But…you pulled your leg up, and used your hand to grab your foot, and bent your head to look at your foot, and re-shifted your weight so that your other leg could support you, and used your voice to utter some word that people taught you to say that doesn’t really have any relevance to this situation. You have all of the thoughts that made you do all of that even though you think it is your reflex response. ,It’s really your brain just working faster than normal. Yes its natural response and reflex but it is also “processing”, which is thinking.
Interestingly, If you were really attracted to the girl on the steps, and hope to make an impression, then your reactions and what you say and how you maneuver, all become different than if you weren’t attracted to her at all. And you won’t even necessarily have to think about that consciously to change it. Your body just reacts differently because of how you felt about someone. But it wasn’t your body. It was your mind… which then controls your body…with thought that you don’t know you are even having. This is getting weird huh?
I had a girlfriend in high school that I was madly in love with. Her dad showed up at one of my basketball games and I saw him up in the bleachers. I played the best game of my life. My brain processed chemicals and created more dopamine and nor-epinephrine and testosterone than it ever had at a game, and my body responded to that and it was all because I had a thought. “Cathy’s dad is here and I want him to like me and tell her I was great!” That one thought changed everything about how I played that night. One thought changed my whole game and made people say things they wouldn’t have said, and caused us to beat our arch rivals and go to the regional tournament, and caused the newspapers to have a different story, and changed the way the coach thought about me, and …made Cathy’s dad think I was great! Which changed my relationship with him. Which made me a happier person. Which made things at my house different and in general made my whole life different…I think?
Right now, I just heard my computer say “its 3 oclock. I’ve been so intrigued by what my mind was thinking about thinking that I didn’t notice time passing. It’s 3 am. I am going to go to bed and post more about thinking later. So…thanks for reading part 1 of random thoughts about thinking….which is a thought I just had because I figured if I was gonna end this thing I should have a name for it which wasn’t a thought at the beginning…so the name at the top was a thought I had here at the end. An example of time displacement, where the first thing was actually the last. But that’s for another time.

Orange Conference, Orangatar, Donald Miller

Posted by: Lanny Donoho on May 2, 2010 at 3:09 pm

We just finished doing the Orange Conference at the Gwinnett Civic Center in Atlanta. 4000 Leaders there from all over the world. What an incredible time! Reggie and I hosted , which is always fun, mainly because, hey, where else can you stand on stage and desecrate and put down, to his face, one of the smartest and best leaders in the country, and get away with it? Reggie and his team were exceptional this year. Donald Miller is always one of my favorite people to listen to just because i love stories and how they really are the main part of what life is about. Perry Noble was there and was typical Perry with shock and awe, but some good stuff. Doug Fields has been a good friend for over 20 years now. It was great having him as part of our team on the main stage and…speaking of that, what kick to be able to have Tic Long on stage and to present to him the Orange Leader award for all he has done to make youth ministry so viable for so long. Being able to do that with long time friends, Chap Clark, Doug, Reggie and Jeanne Stevens was an honor. If you read this blog and you haven’t been to an Orange Conference, here’s my thought. There are very few conferences that I see where everyone wants to be in the main room at all times because of what they don’t know they might miss next. Very few where the content is specifically put together to make sure that leaders really walk away with great content, and frankly very few where we get to be as wild and crazy outside the box to engage a great audience with a lot of laughs and incredible worship. If you work with kids or students, you need to get involved in this movement. Oh yeah and I might as well include our Orangatar Video at the top of this thing. This is really an instructional video on how to get a free Chick Fil A sandwich.

Top 10 “unofficial” CatWest Secrets.

Posted by: Lanny Donoho on April 21, 2010 at 1:04 pm

Ok, so @BradLomenick posted the top 10 things you need to know at Catalyst West. Stuff like parking and tickets and food. There’s another unofficial list that you may want to be aware of. This is stuff that can help you get the scoop on people and things going on there that a lot of folks just won’t know. Some of these might require you to be somewhat bold but, discovering the answers and sending them back to @lannydonoho on twitter could get you books, cd’s or special recognition at Catalyst East. I will post some of ” the secrets” now. And as CatWest moves along you can come back here for more. Anyone you talk to will “act” like they have no idea what this is. You might have to listen to every word of some of the speakers to figure out how to play this. No one’s gonna give you the answer.
Let’s get started.
1. There will be a 30 minute period of time when Tripp, one of your hosts, will be wearing pajama bottoms under his clothing. Send me the name of the cartoon character on those pajamas. He won’t answer at all with any acknowledgement of knowing what you are talking about, unless you ask during the time he is wearing them. If he does answer, have him prove it. Send it to me at @lannydonoho and you get a free Feeband cd.
2.Reggie Joiner will be speaking for a few minutes during the conference. He will repeat a 3 digit number twice during his talk. Send me that number. Guess if you have to.
3. I might actually be walking around near the stage during part of the conference but if i am, it will be in disguise. If you know me and you think you see me, send me what you think I am wearing. color of shirt/jacket, wig color, jeans? etc. This gets you one of Andy’s latest books for free…if you are right. Write it on twitter @lannydonoho
4.Tyler is one of your MC’s. He brought me a prize once (to my office) to ask for forgiveness. find out for wha, and what he brought, and you get two free downloads from Bigstufmedia.com.
5. John Acuff is one of the Lab speakers. Find him. Ask what happened at the Mexican restaurant. If he tells you. Send it to me. I will give away at least 5 of his books and five of mine.
6. This is for any of you who are long time catalyst people. What did I present to John Maxwell for his lifetime achievement award. What did i give to Truett Cathy?
7. There is a secret word that only Tripp and Tyler knows that will get you 100$ worth of media products from BigstufMedia.com It will be a word they say as they are denying that they know what it is…and they will repeat more than once. if you send me that secret word. You get the prize. Limited to five people.
8. This is a social experiment in listening. After Andy Stanley speaks, I would like to see on twitter the most well done encapsulating of his talk that you all can do in 140 characters. It will be interesting to see if all of you heard the same message….or interpreted it the same way. I’ve got some of his books. I’ll give away 4 to the best job of interpreting his message…in 140 characters. Which a lot of my followers would love to read. Bring it @lannydonoho on twitter.
THAT’S 8 …COME BACK FOR MORE TOMORROW.

I Found My Higgs Boson

Posted by: Lanny Donoho on April 19, 2010 at 6:23 am

We can all rest easy now. I found my Higgs Boson. It was hiding underneath a pair of quarks in my sock drawer…and in my nail clipper box…at the same time. Sometimes. wow those things can really get away from you if you aren’t careful.

Found it under my quarks in the sock drawer

Found it under my quarks in the sock drawer


it doesn’t help that they can actually be in two places at one time. (whatever place and time really means)

Think and Rethink with Reggie and Lanny

Posted by: Lanny Donoho on March 19, 2010 at 2:28 am

This was our webcast today.

Watch live streaming video from thinkorange at livestream.com

Who Controls Your Thoughts?

Posted by: Lanny Donoho on March 18, 2010 at 12:19 am

images

Back in the 60’s at one of our Ivy league universities here in the US. (I think it was Yale) some people did a fascinating experiment.  They solicited volunteers to come in to be part of this experiment. I will try to make the description brief. A volunteer would be placed in a room and would hear the voice of another volunteer in another room. (the second volunteer was a set-up unknown to volunteer number 1)

By the way, I am telling this based on my memory of hearing it way back in college so if I get some of the details incorrect just hang with me.  Volunteer one was told that volunteer two would be asked questions and if the got the questions incorrect, then V1 would push a button that gave V2 an electric shock. Each time V2 was wrong the voltage would go up.  V1 would hear the hurt, fear, and eventual terrible pain noises made by V2 when V1 pushed the button.  In the experiment the V1’s would often stop and not want to keep going because V2 would be screaming begging them to stop.  The professor (guy in lab coat who looked very professional and certainly was the symbol of authority) would calmly reassure V1 that it was in the best interest of the experiment and not to worry. Unbelievably, in the majority of cases, V1 would keep going with the pain shocks sometimes until there was no more sound. (like …holy cow did I kill him?)

Interestingly, in France, the have the same thing happening in a game show right now. On television volunteers watch as they play the game and push the levers and deliver the shocks and see people scream and beg them to stop. 16 out of 70 participants stopped and would not shock the contestant any more. You do the math.  A vast majority of players keep playing and keep on believing they are hurting the other contestants because the game show host prods them along.

We are talking for a while about THINKING. What do we think? Why do we think it? How does that relate to our theology and our relationship with God and others?

Here is my question for you today.  Who wore the white coat in your life? What did they tell you was ok?  Do you see anything in the way that you think that actually may cause others to hurt?

Bigger question.  How likely is it that you believe all that you have been taught just because it was the authority figure who taught you that?

When I was in college, I was challenge by a professor to begin to think along these lines.  He told me that we would be tested on the truth. But that sometime during lectures, he was going to lie.(and not tell us when)  And there were some things in our text books that were incorrect. If we wanted a good grade we had to know the truth. Which meant we would have to study,  and study more than one book and look to see if his lectures were true on any given day.  That was when my thinking began to change. I started wondering if my faith was actually based on reality because it was totally based on what my preachers and parents had taught me.

When I started thinking for myself, I began to figure out my faith. And I am still doing that.  We should be reading, listening, searching all the time and not just from people who are in our circles. Find books, and speakers and magazines and tweeters and bloggers who have some interesting things to say, and then you decide what it is that you think.

You may think you already know what you think but that kind of thinking keeps you from thinking the way you would think if you heard people who think things that you have never thought of before.

That was my favorite last sentence.  What do you think?

Think and Rethink webcast

Posted by: Lanny Donoho on March 16, 2010 at 3:38 pm

A note from the Bigstuf Office about Think and Rethink Webcast.

Just wanted to let everyone know that next Thursday, March 18th, at 2:00-3:00 P.M. Eastern time, Lanny is going to be featured on Reggie Joiner’s webcast. Reggie is the founder of ReThink as well as the Orange Conference and currently does a weekly webcast. This week, he will be talking about strategies to help students get plugged into serving in other ministries. After this, Lanny will join Reggie in conversation and they will be talking about the leadership training that takes place at BigStuf Camps during the summer.

The link for this webcast is http://www.livestream.com/thinkorange. You can click here to watch the video live at 2:00. If you would like to join the chat, you will need to create an account beforehand. You can do this by also clicking on the link and clicking on the “sign up for free” tab at the top.

DSC01502

This is something you do not want to miss hearing!!  . . . However, if you are unable to watch at 2 P.M., you can go to www.thinkbigstuf.com where it will be posted on Friday. (If you want to just come in at 2:30 when Lanny and Reggie are talking you are welcome to join in then as well.
We are hoping to continue a webcast on what’s to come at BigStuf 2010, so be looking out for those details!

Hope everyone is having a Terrific Thursday! =) Please contact me if you have any questions!!!

Think

Posted by: Lanny Donoho on March 11, 2010 at 8:41 pm

the_thinker

Our theme for this summers Bigstuf is THINK. I have been thinking about thinking…which kind of makes mental feedback go into some kind of chaotic frenzy if you stay there very long. But…the question is why do we think what we think. All of our thoughts are created by some outside influence. We think something is blue because someone told us to look at a color once and said it was blue and that is now what we think. If you just had a child and you want to see something really cool, teach your kid that all the colors are different than what we know them to be. Show them green and tell them that is red. Do that enough and wow… What would be weird is that the child would grow up and just think they were colorblind when really they just think what they were taught. A 14-year old girl goes into the Gap and decides to buy that cool shirt that she “thinks” she likes and she “thinks” it is her opinion that makes her like it. Really what happened is that some 57 year old guy in a suit in a board room made a presentation a year earlier about what would be cool and that 14 year old girl watched tv and movies and read magazines and saw the same shirt on her favorite musician and she decided she liked it. If that guy in the board room had made a totally different presentation a year earlier, the same girl might have laughed and made fun of that same shirt thinking that she would never dream of wearing it. We grew up in church and either had our “religion” drilled into us or we had a great youth group and we believe and think what we think about God because we had a good experience or because we feel guilty if we don’t or we turn away from those thoughts because someone said “if you believe this, then your life will be fine” and we believed and our dad died and we don’t believe it anymore. The exact same you could have grown up in North Africa and have a totally different belief system and think we are totally right about what we think or believe. Think about that. Whoosh. I want to chat for a few weeks about why we think what we think and I would love to have your thoughts about thinking as we delve into this to get ready for camp. If you have great websites, books, videos, etc about our minds and how they are shaped and our thoughts and why we think them. Join in. Tell your twitter followers. Let’s see what people are thinking. Meanwhile I think we should be asking questions all the time. Who, What, When, Where, Why and how. Especially WHY. WHY? That question by itself changes our thoughts more than any thing else. Lets chat. Think about it. Lanny

Older Posts »